In an extraordinary move, nearly two years after Singapore’s ruling Lee family filed a defamation suit against the Far Eastern Economic Review, a high court judge let it be known to the Lees’ lawyers that he was "searching for a higher defamatory meaning" that would allow the charges to be broadened. Last week, the lawyers took him up on it and amended their complaint to allow for greater penalties.Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his father, legendary strongman Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, are suing the Far Eastern Economic Review and its editor, Hugo Restall, over an August 2006 interview with opposition leader, Chee Soon Juan, in which Chee, among other things, said the island republic wasn’t going to liberalize until Lee Kuan Yew was dead.
After Justice Woo Bih Li’s suggestion, the Lees’ lawyers amended their petition to make sure that an allegedly libelous passage implying that Lee Kuan Yew had condoned corruption on the part of T.T. Durai, the former head of the National Kidney Foundation, also be applied to Lee Hsien Loong, although the offending passage didn’t mention the prime minister. Durai has since been imprisoned for misuse of funds.
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